David Pakman

They're not keeping a tally of who was right and who was wrong.

And audiences also aren't punishing people, elected officials nor media figures for getting it wrong again and again and again.

If a claim aligns with their beliefs.

they are even less likely to hold people accountable for whether it actually happened.

So where we are ending up is a very sad place where a system

allows being wrong with no cost.

And sometimes it even rewards you when you were the first to make wrong predictions boldly and confidently.

You get the clicks, you get the audience, the media environment moves really fast.

And then when it doesn't happen, everybody's forgotten about it.

Now, the Trump era didn't create this.

It did expose it, though.

You can make endless prediction again and again and again.

You get it all wrong and your audience doesn't care.

There is no mechanism to force a reckoning with what people get wrong.

And so the result that is terrifying societally is that the standard for truth has basically gone away.

You get everything wrong all the time.

There's no penalty.

People who hedge and wait for evidence, if anything, are punished because they're not being fast enough in getting you their opinions and they're not being loud and confident enough.

They're saying, well, we need more information about this.

So what we have developed and kind of encouraged here is an informational environment that is driven by repetition more than it is by accuracy.